On Designing Energy Efficient Wi-Fi P2P Connections for Internet of Things

Abstract

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications enable a wider set of applications and use cases in the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Without the presence of Access Points (APs), Wi- Fi Direct, also known as Wi-Fi Peer-to-Peer (P2P), becomes an intrinsic facilitator for IoT applications due to its popularity. In particular, the P2P group owner (GO) plays the role of the AP and is responsible for making connections with P2P group client (GC). In IoT paradigm, power control should be carefully examined to prevent significant power drop on both Wi-Fi P2P GO and GC. By leveraging the information of connections such as received signal strength and retry count, this paper proposes two novel power control mechanisms for Wi-Fi P2P connections in IoT paradigm. We first design a threshold-based mechanism, which limits the maximum number of connection retries to eliminate unnecessary power consumption. However, considering the dynamic change of wireless condition, an adaptive power control mechanism is proposed to further reduce the waste of energy. We establish an intensive experiment by practically implementing both mechanisms in Wi-Fi P2P devices. The experiment results show that the proposed mechanisms can significantly reduce the power consumption and thus makes Wi-Fi P2P connection more efficient for IoT applications.